Today's post from npr.org (see link below) will make alarming reading for neuropathy patients who find it difficult enough to walk at any pace at all. However, if true, the lesson is clear. We must all make an effort to walk more often and a little faster if we want to keep our brains active. However painful, maybe we should all push ourselves just a little more to exercise as much as possible - the rest of our body (if not the nerves) will thank us in the end.
by Linton Weeks August 01, 2014
Wait a minute. Weren't we told by Simon and Garfunkel: "Slow down, you move too fast. You've got to make the morning last"?
And by some other philosopher to "stop and smell the roses"?
Now we learn from new research that walking slow can be a bad thing — or at least reveal that you might be slouching toward Alzheimer's.
Published in the medical journal , the study shows that among older people with memory complaints those who walk more slowly are more susceptible to future dementia.
Plodding Points
After examining hundreds of patients, — a neurologist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and senior author of the paper — realized that if an older person ambles along at a poky pace, he probably also has some cognitive abnormalities.
Measuring a patient's gait speed with a stopwatch, along with asking a few questions to get a handle on the person's cognitive abilities, can be a useful low-tech test for motoric cognitive risk syndrome, or MCR, Joe says. Certain responses to an MCR test can determine whether someone is in the early stages of the dementia process. Early detection and treatment may help slow or prevent dementia's advance.
Joe says that a slow walking speed is considered to be anything slower than a meter a second, or 2.2 miles per hour. The Neurology report is based on a study of thousands of adults around the world.
Not all dawdlers are destined for dementia, Joe points out. Sometimes people's gaits are slowed down by arthritis or inner ear conditions.
Hurry Up
So, we ask Joe, will walking faster help a person ward off dementia? "Epidemiological studies suggest that people who walk regularly have a reduced risk of dementia," he says. "Whether walking faster will reduce risk of dementia needs to be proven — and would be an important next step."
(See what he did there?)
And, he adds, so far there seems to be no correlation between dementia risk and doing other things slowly, such as eating or speaking.
That's beneficial news for aficionados of the Slow Food Movement and for those of us from the American South.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/theprotojournalist/2014/08/01/336830233/slow-walkers-may-be-on-their-way-to-dementia
Following on from recent posts looking at unusual potential sources of pain relief, today's post from emaxhealth.com (see link below) examines the promising properties of a sort of sea snail saliva. It could possible rival morphine in its pain-killing properties and anything that could be a non-addictive substitute for morphine must be welcome in the neuropathy community. Don't expect it to appear soon on the list of approved drugs. They've managed to develop a synthetic version but that has to be injected into the spine and nobody's waiting for that sort of treatment. Still a long way to go then but it's great that people are seriously searching the natural world for alternatives to morphine.
Snail Saliva As Effective as Morphine?
By Deborah Mitchell on July 28, 2010
To treat severe pain, a sea snail may hold an answer. Scientists have developed a new medication first isolated from sea snail saliva that may be as effective as morphine.
Sea snails may not move fast, but what they lack in speed, they more than make up for in chemicals. These animals have the ability to inject a mixture of toxins called conotoxins into their targeted prey using their needle-like teeth.
These conotoxins consist of peptides that can relieve severe neuropathic pain as effectively as morphine, but it does not lead to addiction. Attempts to transform these conotoxins into a drug that could be used as a pain reliever has been challenging. Thus far a synthetic version has been developed, but it must be injected directly into the spinal cord using an implanted pump.
Now, a team of scientists in Australia have developed a conotoxin that can be taken orally. In tests with rats, the new drug proved to be as effective a pain killer as gabapentin, which is the most popular drug to treat neuropathic pain. Compared with the dose of gabapentin needed to treat pain, however, the conotoxin-based peptide (named Prialt) is less than 1 percent.
The research team, led by David J. Craik of the Institute for Molecular Bioscience at the University of Queensland, noted that peptides have generally been regarded to be poor pain killers because they are not stable and mostly not available in oral form. One exception has been the immunosuppressant cyclosporine.
Could a drug based on sea snail saliva be next? Jon-Paul Bignham, a professor of molecular biosciences and bioengineering at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, pointed out that an oral drug that has the pain killer abilities of Prialt “would absolutely revolutionize how we manage chronic and terminal pain.” Move over, morphine.
SOURCE:
Chemical & Engineering News 2010 July 26; 88(30): 39-40
http://www.emaxhealth.com/1275/snail-saliva-effective-morphine
